Between parody Twitter accounts (with some tweets turned into billboards), Despair t-shirts (via reddit), and Spongebob (via @chartier), BP has a bit of a public relations problem. Allegedly restricting photographer access (via DFLL) and shipping in workers (also via @chartier) isn’t exactly helping. I had a hard time figuring out what kind of animal this once was, too (via reddit).

iPad + Velcro. (via fscklog)

John Mayer’s blog reminded me of the Droste Effect, so I created a subreddit dedicated to it.

HelTweetica, a Twitter client in a familiar typeface. I ultimately found the Mac version a bit too limiting. Echofon continues to be my client of choice.

Flojuggler — “Track the periods of girls you know. Seriously.” Glad they added that latter sentence to the tagline. (via reddit)

CSS3 Memory. I won’t spoil what happens when you finish. (via WebKitBits)

The ultimate evidence iPads are selling like hotcakes:

“I can now say ‘we have no f***ing iPads’ in five languages.”

Music Notation with HTML5 Canvas (via WebKitBits)

Q&A: Why was it Entourage:Mac and not Outlook in the first place?

After the release of Entourage, the Exchange team decided to stop development of Outlook for Mac. This left the MacBU with a dilemma: there were two separate code bases, neither of which did everything that was needed.

Uh, I have a question: how messed up is a corporate structure that this happens in the first place? How did communication fail such that Outlook and Entourage were first developed independently (surely somebody said “uh, guys, we’re also developing a mail client for the Mac!”), then one of them abandoned, then the other destined to (insufficiently) replace the former (surely somebody said “we kind of do want to have an Exchange client on the Mac, though!”)?

Two thirds of 2009’s phishing attacks were from a single group. (German article) Phishing strikes me as something where a little education could go a long way. Still haven’t heard of any case among friends and family of mine, non-computer enthusiasts included.

Now this is some nice iPad artwork. More such skins. (via @chartier)

Saving state is a rather common behavior in iPhone OS, and will become default (rather than implemented per-application) in 4.0, but what if you left the app hours or days ago? You may not even remember, much less care, what you had previously been doing in it. (via @danielpunkass)

Palm webOS, on a PC. Uh, sure. (via @chartier)

Wild Fox, a Firefox fork seeking to add H.264 support, may be more attention seeking than substance, but more important than my skepticism is the recognition that pragmatic people still exist. (Even Microsoft, who used to try to compete against MPEG with their Windows Media / VC-1 silliness — submitted as an SMPTE standard and all — now will ship IE 9 with exclusive H.264 support. Why does Mozilla think they can win this?)

More worth reading than the barebones website is the reddit commentary.

Ask a C# question on Stack Overflow, and get detailed information from someone on Microsoft’s C# compiler team. Awesome. (via reddit)

Speaking of pragmatic people, Bruce Schneier wants you to write your passwords down. More of this, please. (also via reddit)

I was gonna make some quip about how IRM “features” like preventing e-mail forwards for “security” purposes could easily be circumvented using copy & paste, screenshots and similar means, but the asinine reality got ahead of me: “Functionality offered by IRM usually comprises: [..] Strong in use protection, such as controlling copy & paste, preventing screen shots and printing.”

A place where I can’t use the information right in front of my eyes for any purpose beyond staring at it sounds absolutely terrific to work at — and all this for the illusion of better “information security”! Next up: encrypt the video signal so you control how output is seen. Oh, right.

Looks like suits will continue to not get it. When I first saw the heading of that blog post, I thought it was a joke, or at best an interesting thought experiment. I’m not laughing any more.

Somewhere between writing in WriteRoom for iPhone, copying, pasting to WordPress’s admin interface and submitting, spaces were replaced into non-breaking spaces, messing up the markup (since non-breaking spaces apparently don’t make for well-formed attribute separators in HTML5 — and really, why would they), causing most (but oddly not all) of the links not to show up. Let’s see if I can find a way to work around this.

Chivalry is officially, literally dead.

It occurred to me that, to make it an order of magnitude more useful, Twitter search needs an ‘n degrees of separation’ setting. Alternatively, get off my lawn.

I’m typing this in WriteRoom for iPhone. It’s fast to launch, gets right back to where you left off without any nagging, syncs with a Google App Engine-based site and comes with more editing-suitable typeface and appearance options than Notes. Nothing to help with markup, but still a good start. Did I mention how fast it launches?

Windows Server is coming to ARM. (article in German)

Between that and some other development you may have heard of, Intel has quite some work ahead with Atom. (via DFLL)

Twitter account @SergeGraystone continues to amuse me.

So Steam for Mac launched, and comes with a time-limited offer for a free Portal. I’d check it out if I had a Mac.

That the games are “real” ports — OpenGL instead of Direct3D; no Cider or similar translation layers, that Valve is providing Mac targeting as a free update for their Source engine SDK, that with many games, you get to reuse the same license you already have, and that game state syncs through Steam cross-platform are undeniably terrific.

UI issues include misuse of typefaces as well as of designated file system areas — Microsoft, too, likes to pollute ~/Documents with non-user-supplied data, but it’s wrong; no excuses. It also apparently makes itself launch on login (under certain unclear conditions). Those should be worked on, but don’t make the news any less exciting for me. I’ll have to reserve judgment on whether this makes for a great case against cross-platform applications and thus plays straight into Steve Jobs’s hands; some seem to think so. So far, I’d say I’ve seen far worse.

Speaking of far worse, Adobe is back with its stunning incompetence at writing installers. This time: silently install Growl whether you like it or not, and only use it for one single, user-hostile purpose. Perhaps they should focus less on loving Apple, and more on trying to use their apps without hair loss. (via @boredzo)

Alahmnat provides a good FAQ of sorts on why open sourcing Uru isn’t quite as easy as it sounds. Solid, but I disagree that the Myst community has had it particularly bad with abusive outsiders; I’d argue on the contrary that we’ve been rather lucky. I’d also be less harsh on Cyan had their initial claims not been as bold. (Via @alahmnat)

Has bike marketing completely missed out on the obvious, pragmatic “it gets you from A to B, fast” answer? (Via @chartier)

John Mayer’s Tumblr account. (Also via @chartier)